During our trip to check out Christmas markets with Grant’s step-brother, we decided to add Bratislava onto what was originally a trip to Budapest. As it turns out, Grant and I are both a quarter Slovak, and his great-aunt had sent us information about the Slovak side of his family, so we decided to see if we could visit a town with relevance to his family history.

I asked my mom to see what she could dig up about our side, and shortly before our trip, she came through with a lot of information from one of her uncles. In the end, we were able to stop at the towns where our great-grandfathers were born (and the one where my great-great-grandfather was born)! Crazy enough, these towns are a mere 15 miles apart as the crow flies.

This trip sparked a desire to learn more about our family history, so Grant has been doing some digging on Ancestry.com, and we’ve learned all sorts of interesting things. It is really cool to learn about our family histories and we are happy we will have a lot of information to pass down to our kids someday.

this is a church in Madunice, Slovakia, where my great-grandfather was born